Page 115 - The Best Waylaid Plans

Author Notes:

Here's the other not-guest comic that I had set up before the sabbatical started.

This, much like the intermission page from Darths and Droids, is a sample of what the DM's session notes looked like before the game actually started. Instead of handwritten notes, though, it's slightly more modern - an open Word document on a laptop set up behind the DM screen.

I always felt like step one of the plan isn't all that necessary. Just either have the party start knowing each other in some way, OR have them start not knowing each other but in a situation that forces teamwork. In my campaign I'm running, they were all in a local prison pending trial for either petty crime OR falsely accused. The backstory explains that since they are considered racially inferior by the local government, there's no chance they'll be let off without the death penalty, and escape from this low-security prison is the best way out. This eventually spiraled into them seeking refuge in a rival country, and becoming the catalyst needed to give that rival country the courage to go to war against their oppressive neighbors.

Huh, what coincidence, in my current campaign they all met in prison for crimes, too... though those were completely accurate charges. Said crimes:
Grave robbing, shooting a man in a bar fight (we're experimenting with the pathfinder firearms rules), summoning fiends, and being a goblin.

The evil cleric is also the party cook (did you know animating a skeleton is the quickest way to debone meat?), the gunslinger constantly complains about how much it costs him to shoot his gun, the summoner pulls his jackalope shaped monster out of a hat and keeps trying to get work at children's parties, and the goblin is the sanest party member. It's pretty fun.

I've not heard of that being done. The closest I recall was a campaign where the goal was a particular item that the party pursued for over a year...only to discover that someone NPC had retrieved it back at the start of the campaign. When the DM keeps the players on course while having them derailed them from the start, it's just a shaggy dog adventure.

I've never heard of that happening. While I don't roleplay all that much, I've sat in on some friends' sessions just because they're so amusing. It's always so hard to keep a straight face though, when my friends are such complete whackjobs. If there is any conceivable way for them to go completely off the rails and escalate the campaign to the level of utter absurdity, they will find it. One campaign ended, due to some completely harebrained decisions and really lucky rolls, with the party literally chucking the DnD equivalent of Cthulu across the planet. The DM, who's a huge Lovecraft fan and was basically intending for them to lose (as is fitting when you're up against Cthulu), was completely speechless for several minutes.

And there's been several other campaigns that went completely off the rails, with various different DMs. Not even they can predict their own actions, which makes sense, I suppose. After all, despite whatever alignments their characters claim to have, almost all of them end up playing just a few steps away from chaotic stupid.

A party I was part of did that. We followed all of our dms plot points, but the last encounter for an island we were on was supposed to be impossible. Afterwords we would wake up, the McGuffin destroyed, and we would have to collect the shards. Somehow we won though, completely breaking the campaign. As such he put us on a temp adventure and figured out how to put us into a alternate universe where different us's failed. He forgot that the PCs can win anything, even if they have no healer...

I GM'd a campaign a little under two yars back. The players were going along great and seemed to love the game, but we got a new guy in who seemed to only want to derail stuff for the sake of derailing, not caring what his other party members or the GM thought. He convinced a few other players that "spur-of-the-moment play is the best play; you make the game, not some dude behind a screen."

They raised Hades for a few sessions before I finally just decided to LET them do whatever they wanted rather than convince them to try and follow any plot or sidequest threads. They quickly discovered that without a plot to derail, derailing things for the heck of it isn't that fun. Nor is it fun when all those unabashedly stupid decisions you made earlier results in multiple factions teaming up and ambushing the party.

TPK ensued, one loon left the gaming group, and everyone else (myself included) regarded it as a learning experience.

There was the time that we had a guy show up for one session, knocked the evil crown off of the bewitched NPC, put it on his head and then left the party... One session ruined, and now we have an evil crown floating around the world...

AMV Hell is a series of videos, where they take short videos of different anime and add in audio from songs and other, unrelated videos in comedic fashion (recently there have been similar videos with Ponies instead of anime).

This particular clip is video from One Piece (the pigeon) with audio from Scary Movie 2.

Not dead, not in a faction war (And not tell you guys? Please). Last quarter of college has not been kind, and I have to put off writing more alt-scripts. Just letting you know I'm alive and well. Loved the guest comics so far.

Heh. "Next session". I think one of the themes for this comic will be setting up drastic overarching subplots that are resolved quickly.

TS: Alright, girls. We managed to get that dragon out of Equestria.
RD: Still wish we could have just beaten it up.
AJ: Considering that you managed to buck it in the face and LIVE, I'd count that as a win.
Rarity: Simply wonderful work, Fluttershy. I'm surprised you managed to scold it away. So, same time next week?
DM:...I might need a little more time.
AJ: More time? Why would...no.
DM: You were supposed to find an arrogant professional dragon slayer and do sidequests to make it seem like saving Ponyville would boost his reputation. Now I have to start over.
FS: Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to ruin your plans.

OK, you have to understand what Paranoia is in order to get it. Paranoia is a game that encourages backstabbing and killer gaming where character death is so expected that everyone is playing different clones of their character because their character was killed off in game.

Now, in the setting, the entire game is set in a dome ruled by a computer, who is designed to protect the human race. He uses the knowledge of the past in order to protect its citizens. Unfortunately, a lot of history was lost and the computer knows only bits and pieces, like knowing that the communists were a threat with out understanding why they are a threat. With that little bit of knowledge and with the cold "logic" of knowing the best way to protect the many is to eliminate the few "threats", the computer serves as a tyrant who kills anyone that is even perceived as a threat using troll logic and paranoid reasoning.

Now for the security level. Everybody in the city has a security level based around a color of the rainbow, on top of infrared (black, lowest) and ultraviolet (white, and only the computer/gm has that clearance). You are only authorize certain knowledge based around your security level, though what knowledge is authorized to you is also classified. Technically you are not even suppose to know the rules of the game because that is ultraviolet classified. Finally, the computer is so paranoid that if you are associated with a color beyond your security clearance, you are destroyed, up to the point if a security clearance red eats a plum, then he could be killed simply because violet is way above his security level.

In a nutshell, it is a game where you are not trying to win, just screw your teammates over.

Rarity wins Paranoia by default, even without her sleazy manipulation skills.

Also Pinkie Pie, who wins by being a registered mutant that does absolutely nothing traitorous/communist the whole game until the debriefing, where she describes every other players action in vivid detail (including implied treasons) and backed with evidence.

Talking Paranoya are we? I once intentionally did something really stupid in an attempt to kill off the last other player. I got really lucky that it worked. We were both reporting to the computer, and the other player was about to report having caught me using my mutant abilities, an act of treason.

Right before he can say anything though, I quickly ask him what it takes to reach purple security clearence. He just rolls his eyes and says that that information is above my security clearence.

I quickly shout that the information that it was above my security clearence is above his security clearence, that's treason!

The computer kills him. Then I give my report. "As sole survivor of the mission, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that I did all the work."

When I used to play Paranoia, the GM made us spend an entire twelve sessions on a mission spanning five sectors, (DAO, POW, MNT, and DNA, of you're interested), on an item recovery. Namely, a signed Teela O MLY lunchbox belonging to Art U WAR. Yes, you heard right. And then at the end the poor sod who was carrying the case when we finally delivered it back to Art U was summarialy executed because the lunchbox was Blue. He was only Green.

Funny, I have the opposite compulsion - I DON'T add things to my dictionary for some reason, because that would leave it in a non-default state. Even rather blatant gaps in the dictionary, like "teleport". (it helps that I tend to be good with spelling, obviously)

Y'know, I should probably stop doing that, even though it WILL create more work when settling myself into a new computer... Or I could just leave that "teleport" up there with a red squiggly.

You know, the way this page is laid out makes me think the DM is starting to lose it. Like he's just sitting at his desk rereading his notes, with images of how they got derailed every time flashing in his head-

"...nowhere to run, and are now paralyzed"
*Image of Pinkie laughing them away*
"...beat them easily, but leave them unconscious"
*Image of Twilight's rant and successive activation of elements*
-and so on like that.

He then proceeds to write up an entirely new session, one in which there is no way they could break away again, where he will think of everything, where they will be left helpless to his machinations as DM, and will fear his retribution, where they will have to fight an epic level bad guy, an Ancient Dragon, on a mountain with no Elements to help....

I think Lauren Faust had said that she wanted to make that first adventure last over the first season, but Hasbro wanted a show they could rerun in any order and noone would get confused. Plus it is a show that is targeted towards Little Girls, what little girl has that much of an attention span, over-arching storylines tend to be for an older audience

Ya, my notes go pretty much the same way, but more vague and with multiple choice paths, to try and predict how things can derail and be already prepared for a certain groups decisions and personalities~

I have a big excel file with stats for enemies and traps, and maybe some hand-drawn maps, and I just keep most everything else in my head as best I can because if I need to react I'm not going to be able to search through written out notes on who's doing what anyway.

My style, usually, is to write it all down in grand detail and THEN keep it all in my head. The act of writing it down, fleshing out every detail and giving everything an explicit statement, tends to help my memorization and improvisation, I find.

In the ongoing game I'm running, I've adapted Gygax's world, but after that, it's been made wholly up myself. Just kep the names and shape of the continent, for the most part. But that means I had to invent the rest. Religions, pantheons, backhistory, and so on. I even wrote a short story which introduced the critical elements.

But as a rule, I don't write up pre-game notes. What I do is write up what's happened, and some general ideas of what the bad guys will probably do in the coming months. Nothing scripted. That gives me maximum flexibility depending on what the players do.

I tend towards writing the basic outline down and then trying to remain flexible beyond that. It seems to have worked; the closest the players have come to destroying my rails was actually beating half of what was meant to be an unbeatable encounter at the time (two lv. 5 antagonists with class levels against three lv. 2 PCs). Fortunately, they didn't quite have the HP to outlast the other guy and thus my plot continued unencumbered.

And the best part? The game the next day was a super serious one. You had to play whetever you ended up as in character or you got a penalty. You have no idea how hard that was for everybody, even more so considering there was a prize at the end. In addition to my level 3 blue centaur unicorn drow fighter/ranger, we had a level 6 garden gnome golem bard with built in bagpipes, a level 8 tinker gnome artificer with a sweedish accent who wielded a high energy armor piercing balistic angry housecat gun, a level 5 umber hulk ninja, and a level 4 dwarven berzerker/sorceror/drunken master.

Hey Kaleopolitus! Been a while, nice to see you back. I don't usually do this, but I really wanted to get your oppinion on a previous post. Go back four pages to find it. I'm really looking foreward to your reaction, or even better, your attempt to tell me of a time that topped it. I've been wanting to show it to you for a while now ^u^

Personally, I think it will be the GM finally becoming so paranoid after all the campaign derails that she starts blatantly railroading them before they can do anything. Also shouting. Lots of crazy shouting.

She then discovers that her dominating the players caused her to derail her own campaign. Her frail GM psyche snaps.

Things go downhill the following session, as the players discover she has Pinkie Pie's Random Event d1000.

"PP: Wait a minute, I don't recall giving you this!"
"GM: You didn't. I took them from your house during the break."
"PP: ...What."
"GM: Speaking of which, you forgot to lock the backdoor."

This goes on until the players manage to get her drunk with a mixture of chocolate milk and booze. They manage to cure themselves and finish the campaign moments before the GM passes out, forgetting the whole session the following morning.

The PCs take a peek at the GM notes, which were left behind. They agree to bury them and vow never to speak of this session again.

I recently started GMing for the first real time. Turns out... I SUCK at it. Well, combat, anyway. I gave one of the guys an OP gun, and the rest of them just couldn't dodge the characters long enough to make an impact.

Although, nothing plotwise has really happened, so... I guess I could be wrong.